북한 주민의 일상생활과 인권의 사회적 구성

Abstract

The human rights violations that North Korean refugee women encounter are not separate incidents based on individually specific conditions, but tend to emerge continuously within the political, economic, social, and cultural structures of each space we examined. Human rights violations involve repeated and concrete instances that may arise generally for all North Korean refugee women due to the characteristics of the respective social structures. The emergence of a ‘structuralized’ environment of human rights violations is caused by a combination of the structure of human rights violations retained from before the 1990s and the worsened socio-economic reality following the economic crisis of the 1990s; in the last ten years, their combined effects have become structuralized even further. Patterns of human rights violations have diversified, the scale of infringements has expanded, and modes of violations have become more systematic. From a human rights perspective, the ‘routinization of economic plight’ grants the state greater room for intervening in market-centred livelihood activities through forms of control, physical violence, and exploitation. This involves regular and widespread violence, exploitation, and victimization of North Korean people. Especially, North Korean women are exposed to the existing androcentric patriarchal order and the use of authoritarian power, to a discriminatory order of social stratification, and within it, to an intermediate structure of discrimination and exploitation as they are faced with a situation in which they have to bear the exclusive responsibility for securing their livelihoods through market-related activities.